Coruscant Rising
by Jarmatus
Summary: TNG / Star Wars crossover. The Enterprise-E is hurled into the middle of the Outer Rim, there to experience strange, wonderful, and not quite so very wonderful things. WIP, please read and review.
1. Chapter 1: Prologue

Stardate 50390.06

It's not often one will see a space-time distortion of this magnitude. It really is quite spectacular, though – a searing point of light hanging in space for a second, then to spit out an almost liquid purple glow.

Looking back on it these days, some say it was the work of the Q Continuum. Perhaps a Borg ship activated its transwarp drive at the wrong time. Perhaps it was a natural thing. One thing is certain, though – it wreaked all kinds of havoc upon the local cosmos.

Stardate 50946.23

"_Alright, we're done here. _Enterprise_ standing by. NCC-73515_ Nova _moving out."_

The _Nova_-class' namesake vessel kicked its warp engines into gear and shot into superlight space at warp six. After what was almost a courtesy period of fifteen seconds, the _Sovereign_-class hybrid cruiser NCC-1701 _Enterprise_ replaced it, training its long-range sensors on the anomaly in the interim.

"Power use levels falling to impulse normal. We are fully out of warp... now, sir; proceed as desired," reported Data at operations, unshakably calm as ever.

"Thank you, Mr Data. Take us in," from Captain Jean-Luc Picard, with not the vaguest hint of a smile. There wasn't much to be happy about – this anomaly had been randomly swallowing light starships. Granted, it was intriguing, but it didn't outweigh the possible loss of life incurred. Still, their station coordinate should be safe.

The starship followed a gentle but fast curve into mid-sensor range, with more and more turreted antennae across the hull curving around and clicking into place to focus on the anomaly. Streams of data combined to run through the ship's semi-sentient computer and be combined into a report.

_SENSOR DIGEST FOLLOWS_

_ANOMALY CENTRE EXACTLY TEN KILOMETRES ACROSS._

_ANOMALY FIELD EXACTLY ONE MILLION KILOMETRES ACROSS._

_NO PERCEPTIBLE MASS._

_SENSOR DIGEST ENDS_

Picard studied the digest, which had been shunted into a corner of the viewscreen for the command staff's attention. It certainly didn't make much sense; natural singularities tended to have irregular centre and field numbers with many decimal points, which Data had at times been known to recite to the last decimal place, incurring temporary insanity among the senior officers.

He supposed everyone was tetchy. They'd just fended off a Borg invasion of Earth, and without so much as a by-your-leave, or, for that matter, a leave of any sort, they'd been shunted off to a relatively minor cluster to scan a relatively minor anomaly.

_Still—_

And then nothing. Flashes rippled across the hull; Data, still calm as ever, reported, "Captain, we appear to be in the grip of some kind of matter transporter almost exactly identical to our own. No..."

He was abruptly cut off, and Picard's vision lasted just long enough to see Data, then the walls of the Enterprise shimmer into ephemerality...

* * *

_How rude of me._

* * *

...and then back out again.

A few of the bridge officers muttered under their breaths. Data tapped a few icons on his console, then swiveled his neck an unnatural number of degrees to look at Picard, seemingly about to say something in his detached, scientifically-curious manner, when he was interrupted by a chime and the voice of Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge.

"_La Forge to bridge. No matter how far you go, there you are, it seems. So where are we, is pretty much what I'm asking."_

Picard smiled slightly. "Good work, Mister La Forge. Data?"

"Sir. We seem to be on the outer galactic rim, unknown quadrant. Checking star patterns..."

A moment's silence.

"Data?"

"Sir. No match. Reanalysing... again, no match."

A chill ran silently through the bridge crew. The Delta Quadrant? Nobody had been there, though everyone thought that was where _Voyager_ might have gone. Subsequent sensor sweeps put the lie to that, though, when they picked up a ship of no known design approaching.

"Data, what do we have?" Picard asked the question everyone was contemplating.

"One ship approaching, standing at five thousand kilometres off the starboard bow. 375 metres in length. Slightly primitive, but heavily armed with what appear to be some kind of capital ship killers. Smaller strike craft appear to be shielding it. Reading one hundred life signs... sir, the ship is hailing us."

A chime, and then a voice broke through onto the bridge.

"_This is New Republic Defence Force escort _Stendaff_ calling unidentified vessel. Kindly identify yourselves immediately – you are deep within New Republic space. If you do not identify yourselves, we will fire."_

An instant's silence, then a number of the bridge crew broke out in wild applause, for what, they didn't know – but they were, to an extent, safe. Picard keyed the comms from his chair, smiling broadly.

"Escort _Stendaff_, this is the starship _Enterprise_ NCC-1701 of the United Federation of Planets. No harm is intended."


	2. Chapter 2: Culture Shock

**Author's Note:** Thank you to all who have written kind words about this fic. Also, I'll try to update more over my two-week holiday period.

_The road goes ever on and on_

_Down from the door where it began_

Engines emitting a paradoxically silent yet audible hum of life, the _Enterprise_ sailed majestically through space, dwarfing its potent little alien escort.

_Now far ahead the road has gone_

_And I must follow if I can_

Credits and illegally-smuggled latinum bars were swapped wildly among the crews of both ships as the news – "Hey, we found aliens!" – filtered down to the junior officers and ratings. Several people stood to lose quite a bit of money (each) over this, until their various senior officers issued them reprimands and confiscated their items of barter.

_Pursuing it with eager feet_

_Until it joins some larger way_

As the Federation starship and its Republic Defence Force escort arrowed grandly through space, a sense of destiny overtook the by-then-scattered illegal betting in the general preoccupation stakes over the course of some hours and made even the most profit-driven, greedy crew member place down his, her or its tokens of monetary exchange to think for a second.

_Where many paths and errands meet_

_And whither then? I cannot say_

On the final approach run to the designated journey completion coordinates (which correspond, Data impassively informed the senior staff, to a fortification of some description) more ships curved in to assume escort positions around the big cruiser, slotting in perfectly symmetrically. Some even have their own little auras offighter craft. All in all, it was an undeniably majestic sight – a cautiously optimistic people welcoming strangers into their midst.

* * *

There was a frantic flurry of activity among the Sullustan base command. Sullust had borne the closest orbital port to the anomaly – unluckily for the New Republic staff there, however, the _Enterprise_ was bigger even, at 700 metres, than the captured Star Destroyers they had planned to dock. Luckily, by a saucer separation, some of the ship's officers could dock (just barely) with the port, although the more cautious battle bridge watch were making sure to keep a very close watch and a barely safe mini-orbital distance from the station.

Security personnel loudly big-noted themselves in the presence of senior officers, implicitly queuing, as it were, to be the first to make their way into this strange alien domain. Starfleet had not selected the _Enterprise_'s senior staff in error, however – almost invariably, all the security teams selected were composed of the quietest, most unassuming guards. A loud voice did not diplomacy make, especially not in conjunction with a gun.

* * *

Picard stepped onto the platform with a smile. It wasn't every day – to be fair, it was every other day – that one made contact with an unknown alien race, and this looked to be a federation of them; _Stendaff_'s staff had definitely been human, but the port authority chief had been of some odd humanoid race which (the opinion had been expressed, and he had had to privately admit to himself) looked like a take on old drawings of Oriental people. He believed they were called Sullustans, but the name had only been mentioned once.

With the usual command of 'Energise', the _Enterprise_'s finest officers, diplomats and guards vanished into the quantum fabric, to tunnel their way out in one of the port's plazas. This was, as always, a shock to their new hosts – it appeared only the Federation possessed teleportation technology, and even Picard himself had sometimes wondered why other governments didn't just improvise on their local hyperdrives.

As the blue mist faded out, Picard absently noted a black, skeletal metal thing of some sort directly in front of him. The absentness vanished quite quickly when he realised that this was to be their robotic guide – a protocol droid, he believed they were called. The droid spoke in an almost human voice, tinged with a slightly upper-class British accent: odd, in a galaxy that had never seen so much as an atom of a genuine Briton. Maybe he was simply applying his experience to a situation where it was inapplicable.

"Captain Jean-Luc Picard and company, I presume?"

Picard was already impressed. The droid had assimilated speech structures nothing like its own in what must have been a remarkably short amount of time. It had even pronounced correctly a name which his own race apparently found difficult, which was quite something in a first contact situation.

"Indeed I am. And you might be?"

"X5K-3PO, protocol droid. I'm to be your guide here, as you are no doubt aware – the port authority chief regrets he cannot be here in person, but may check in via two-way sensors from time to time. Do please follow me."

Picard relaxed and took the droid's advice. _Lead on, MacDuff._

Meanwhile, the station's denizens were looking on in wonderment. Who were these strange beings...? Well, that question was quickly quashed – '_they're humans, you idiot!'_

The next question proffered was: _Why the hell are they here?_ Rumours were spreading like wildfire throughout the station, as illegal gambling had done throughout the NRDF escorts. And the question was a worthy one – why would non-Republican humans pick what was, even in its orbit of Sullust, a minor, back-end-of-nowhere military base?

As the humans appeared in various areas of the station, some obstructive protocol droid giving them a tour and warding off curious spectators, the rumours were only amplified.

_A friend of a friend said they just showed up on the docking ring out of nowhere! Like, literally, nowhere! Blue cloud type thing... they just appeared._

'_Trippy,'_ was the general consensus. Within minutes, the crew of the starship had gained the ability to fly, and to hold talking ghosts in little decorative badges. The obligatory phaser units carried by each of the officers would became the most duplicated things on the station, thanks to a whole corps of shady Sullustans looking to make a few credits on the side. Extortion and gambling apparently just weren't enough.

Finally, the tall one that sounded like a protocol droid enquired with the actual protocol droid as to where the port authority chief could be found. A call was made, and the 3PO unit promptly provided directions; the population of the station collectively sighed as the humans entered a high-security area that was beyond the ken of mere rates and junior officers.

* * *

Picard eyed the searing green light in the elevator's corner with some small resentment. For a sole source of illumination, the aliens could have done much better – but then, who was he to judge? From what he'd seen on the way in, the entire planet was, in their defence, green.

With an abrupt clang, the lift came to a stop and disgorged its passengers, gently pushing them out with a focused antigrav field. Before them lay an empty plaza second in beauty to almost none that they had seen; tasteful decorations, tasteful furniture, and not a soul in sight, although apparently-stone doors of perhaps fifty feet height lay before them. Certainly not the ordinary decorations of a flag officer, one might think – and Picard realised with a guilty start that he had no idea who the port authority chief was. A couple of seconds of mental self-chastising later, he walked up to the doors, which glided silently open before him, revealing a long corridor floored with impeccably laid and polished tiles of some kind of translucent silver, appearing almost to change under his feet as he strode forward. Ahead was another, identical set of doors, marked with comfortably low-brightness green light strips, which glided open again, revealing a gigantic office with a beautiful view on the overwhelmingly lush planet below.

Upon Picard's entry, the light ring far above began to gleam, and the man staring out of the window swung around with no sign of surprise. And a human he was; young, with black hair that reminded the _Enterprise_'s captain uncomfortably of one Adolf Hitler. The white shipsuit he wore, whose collar was marked with what Picard assumed was an alien alphabet on one side, and the Roman lettering NRDF SULLUST PORT AUTHORITY CHIEF on the other, accentuated his height and his unnatural slimness.

"Captain Jean-Luc Picard?" Again, flawless pronunciation. Strange. "I'm Dakken, port authority chief for the Sullust orbital. It's, of course, a pleasure to meet you, and I'm sorry I couldn't do so earlier.

"Now, given that your scan quarantine here is complete, I wish to be the first to volunteer to have you escorted to Coruscant." At a blank look from Picard, he expounded in a manner which suggested he knew damn well Picard hadn't known what it was. "Republic's capital planet. Beautiful place. It's like a sea of heroes' swords rising from the rock. And there's so many 'swords', as it were. At least, that's my point of view."

Picard took his turn at speaking. "Mr., ah, Dakken," ("Call me Dakken,") "I'd be delighted to take up your offer, but, ah, might I ask why the offer was so prompt?"

"Well. Our new co-Chief of State... His Excellency Jacen Solo," and here Dakken bowed his head in what appeared almost to be grovelling respect, "was most pleased to hear of his Republic's new visitors. He would, of course, have come to this Orbital, except that he cannot leave Coruscant at the present time – however, he still does quite desire to meet you and your crew, and would thus entreaty you to accept an invitation to Coruscant." The whole spiel, although smoothly delivered, sounded somehow wrong to Picard, but no other of his staff signalled there was anything out of place. Not a twitch from anyone, even Deanna Troi.

With no recourse, Picard bowed his head gracefully. "Please tell His Excellency that we would be most delighted to come to Coruscant and meet with him. Might we go by our own ship?"

"Oh, of course. You may go whenever you wish."

* * *

Once aboard the _Enterprise_ again, Picard felt a hand fall on his shoulder. He turned – it was Deanna Troi, looking worried. "Captain, I could not read Dakken while we were there. Usually, I would at least feel an absence, if somebody were to be shielding their mind – this time, nothing." She must have seen something on his face, for she hastened to continue. "Of course, it might be something about the humans of... here... that gives them a natural shield."

Picard nodded, unsmiling. "Nevertheless, please keep watch."

Some time later, he arrived back at his twilit quarters and slipped in quietly. His console, over on the desk, was flashing something at him, and his eyes took a moment to adjust: SYSTEM NOTIFICATION.

According to the data on the screen, a heavily encrypted call, with no apparent endpoint, had come from Dakken's office just over thirty seconds after Picard left. At the same time, the entire integrated cylinder comprising said office had simply dropped off the _Enterprise_'s wide-range sensors, yielding a reading of a couple of metres of interstellar gas and dust. The sensor lieutenant had just left his console to go off shift, and his replacement hadn't noted anything unusual; the only reason Picard even had a notification was because the ship's computer had noted the event as an undocking.

He was starting to feel deeply uneasy, but he knew he could not drop a chance to open relations with a fellow interstellar nation to the Federation simply on the strength of a hunch. The meeting with His Excellency would go ahead as planned.


End file.
